The way we were: 1950s saw birth of modern healthcare

Published 4:42 am, Monday, June 5, 2017

In many respects, the modern era of health care in the Jacksonville area began in 1953 with the opening of a state-of-the-art hospital here.

The new Passavant Memorial Area Hospital “brought … significantly improved health-care delivery to the community,” said Dr. E.C. Bone in a 2003 interview. Bone practiced medicine in Jacksonville from 1947 to 1989.

Hundreds of people attended the dedication ceremonies for the new $2.1 million hospital on West Walnut Street on June 20, 1953. Carroll T. Hughes, Passavant’s administrator at the time, gave a short speech at the dedication, emphasizing that “this hospital belongs to you, the citizens of this area, and we, the staff, will do all in our power to serve you to the best of our abilities.”

Other speakers that day also recognized the approximately 8,000 donors who contributed more than $700,000 to two fundraising campaigns to build the hospital.

The new Passavant replaced an antiquated hospital complex on East State Street, where the Church of Our Saviour stands today. Construction of the brick, steel and concrete hospital building began in July 1950.

A 1953 Jacksonville Daily Journal story said the hospital opened with “a basic capacity of 135 beds. The bedrooms are large enough to accommodate an additional 37 beds, if and when necessary, without putting patients in the corridors.”

The report went on to say that nothing had been overlooked in building the new Passavant. Piped-in oxygen and bathrooms were in every patient’s room. Bedside intercom systems allowed patients to contact the nurses’ station.

The hospital also featured several operating rooms, a physio-therapy unit, laboratory, laundry, kitchen, gift shop, solarium, an employees’ cafeteria, pharmacy and coffee shop.

“Some of these things, such as the pharmacy and the physio-therapy unit, were new features that were not present in the old hospital,” said Gertrude Hohmann in 2003. She was director of nursing at Passavant from 1952 to 1972. “The post-anesthesia recovery room was a modern feature we were fortunate to have in the new hospital.”

Hohmann credited Passavant’s various department heads for helping to open the new hospital. “These people did a masterful job to set up the new hospital and to maintain the old one until day one,” she said. Day one was July 9, 1953, when patients were transferred from the old hospital to the new building.

“The head nurses in every department did a good job in setting up their unit so that every patient would receive excellent care,” Hohmann said.

“The doctors discharged from old Passavant all patients considered capable of leaving,” Bone said. “Each of the remaining patients was assigned a nurse who accompanied that patient to the new Passavant.”

Hohmann added: “The dietary department did a fantastic job to serve breakfast to the patients and the nursing staff in the old hospital and lunch in the new.”

Bone recalled other differences between the two Passavant hospitals. “The expanded emergency room services and the markedly enlarged emergency rooms were a great improvement over the old Passavant Hospital,” he said. “In that era, local doctors were called to attend emergency room patients. Eventually, a rotation system was established to provide emergency room, on-call doctors from within the Jacksonville community. There were no specific emergency room physicians.”

A Jacksonville Daily Journal editorial writer in 1953 said the opening of Passavant Memorial Area Hospital marked “the attainment of a very important objective in the never-ending struggle to minimize the suffering of mankind.”